A German POW in Pennsylvania — At 101, He Tells His Story

In the spring of 2026, a small film crew sat down with a man of 101 — a former German soldier the film introduces only as Ernie — and asked him to remember the war he ended not on a battlefield, but behind barbed wire in rural Pennsylvania. He was one of 371,163 German prisoners held in the United States. Pennsylvania alone held fifteen POW camps: the great base camp at Fort Indiantown Gap, a tent stockade on the Gettysburg battlefield where prisoners harvested Adams County's apples, and a secret interrogation centre hidden in the pines at Camp Michaux, where some 7,500 prisoners were screened in silence. This is the documented story of those camps — the trains, the harvests, the chow lines and the rule book that governed them all — and of what it means that one of the last men who lived it survived long enough to tell it kindly. CHAPTERS 00:00 At 101, He Tells His Story 01:00 From Capture to Pennsylvania 01:55 425,000 Prisoners 03:20 The Long Way In 04:10 Fifteen Camps 05:28 Inside the Wire 06:24 Gettysburg 07:49 The Apple Harvest 08:43 The Secret Camp 09:37 The Sorting 10:43 Fed Like Soldiers 11:32 Sundays Behind Wire 12:25 The Neighbours 13:29 The Hard Core 14:20 1945 15:10 The Numbers 16:05 Going Home 17:09 The Verdict SOURCES Office of the Provost Marshal General — inspection reports, Indiantown Gap POW camp, 1944–45 Gettysburg Group / National Park Service files — the Gettysburg POW camp, Emmitsburg Road, 1944–46 Cumberland County Historical Society — Camp Michaux historical site; David L. Smith, walking tour (2013) George G. Lewis & John Mewha — History of Prisoner of War Utilization by the U.S. Army (1955) Arnold Krammer — Nazi Prisoners of War in America Photographs: U.S. Signal Corps & U.S. Army via the National Archives & Wikimedia Commons (public domain) Displaying desc71.txt.